Infection is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with acute leukemia and a major cause in other types of advanced malignancies such as Hodgkin's disease and oat cell carcinoma of the lung. The aims of this project are to catalogue and identify the infections, identify the predisposing factors and evaluate new techniques for more rapid and/or accurate diagnosis of infection. This program has been in progress for over eight years and has allowed meaningful evaluation of the types of infection occurring in different types of tumor patients. Specific problems have been identified such as the nature of hospital acquisition of potential pathogens including bacteria and fungi. This epidemiologic data has allowed appropriate and logical development of infection prevention techniques and application of newer methods of infection diagnosis such that there has been a reduction of infection morbidity and mortality.